Welcome back to Sinica after our New Years break. And what could headline our first podcast of the New Year but Egypt, where an unexpected political uprising has raised obvious parallels for China-watchers worldwide. Moving beyond the politics of protest, we also delve into the story of group-purchasing site Groupon, whose tongue-in-cheek Tibetan advertisement during the Super Bowl has tarnished the company's image in China and damaged its largest strategic partnership in the country.Joining Kaiser Kuo in our studio today is Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder and lead editor of danwei.org. Our other participants include Gady Epstein, a Sinica recidivist and the Beijing Bureau Chief of Forbes Magazine, along with Will Moss who has also been on the show before and joins us to share his expertise on how not to "do a Groupon" in China.On a side note, if you'd like your MP3 player to download Sinica automatically whenever a new show is released, subscribe to the show by creating an account on Popup Chinese. Another option is manually subscribing via iTunes. Just select the option "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced menu and copying the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica into the box when prompted. You are also welcome to download this mp3 directly from Popup Chinese as a standalone mp3 file. Enjoy!
palafx
said on February 23, 2011
Perhaps I'm a bad person, but I found the Groupon commercial tremendously funny.
barrister
said on February 24, 2011
Yeah. I thought the fish curry bit was actually pretty good.
palafx
said on February 24, 2011
Seriously though, I didn't perceive it as a jab at Tibetans at all. It was more of a trap that took advantage of western willingness to feel sorry for faraway peoples about whom they know very little.
jed.camino
said on February 24, 2011
I don't think it's an issue of sympathy -- Chinese people take kneejerk offense whenever anyone else mentions Tibet the same way they'll get irate if you talk about life in Taiwan without a minute-long preamble about how it is clearly part of the mainland despite all practical and historical evidence to the contrary.
China needs to grow up and get over these complexes. But they won't for a while because at least for now it's more convenient for Chinese kids to get pissed off about how foreigners treat China than it is for them to actually get pissed off at their own government. The former is sanctioned behavior and the latter gets them thrown in jail.
palafx
said on February 26, 2011
That last bit isn't so different from the US, minus the jail part. The spirit of internationalism is commiseration between people complaining about different governments.
